We meet Kit, brought up by a well-meaning but uncomprehending cousin and a professor father, largely absent in all but body, as she discovers ‘if you can’t lead your own life, you’re not you at all.’ She comes to realise that she is a song bird and gradually she finds the courage to follow her…
I like this book: there’s a warmth and delicacy here. But it and almost all of the books by this Finnish emigre to Canada are now out of print. It was published in 1964 and illustrated by the prolific and foxy Edward Ardizzone. Foxy, because for me there’s a mystery about his work; it is…
I suppose we might say that the Iron Man is Ted Hughes himself, the strong man who fell off a cliff and broke into pieces, but then painstakingly found the pieces and bolted them back together. Eating tractors and cars and barbed wire, he sought to eat up the modern world and let something more…
A short tale, copiously and sensitively illustrated by Ben Shahn, of the Prague ghetto in the 1550s. A Christian boy is discarded by his master in settlement of a debt to become the servant of one those terrible Jews whose black souls the Devil will have when they die. Except, to his awakening astonishment, his…
Issac is playing by the stream and wonders where the water he pours back into it from his jam jar goes. Minimal text and a journey across a mythic world shows a child the rain cycle. Dreamy pictures combine with simple scientific exposition. Facts are presented hand in hand with the mystery and beauty of…
Well. this one is my own. It’s taken a while. To quote C.S.Lewis in his introduction to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, “when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books”. Mostly pictures with just a few words, Hurrah for Horace takes you through a day with Horace…
A lovely warm book with some of the silliness a child can enjoy. At the same time it quietly addresses the development of a child’s existence as she becomes distinct and other than her parents. Alice’s mum and dad don’t notice there’s lion in the house for ages and when they do they have completely…
It’s great to see a book set in an environment distant from what most readers will be familiar with. Based on her own island life the author/illustrator not only brings a community to life, but makes it coherent too. She conveys a real feeling for how everyone (including the animals who crop up all over…
One of the great writer / artist collaborations, Axel Scheffler’s simultaneously down-to-earth and slightly dotty illustrations complement Julia Donaldson’s stomping rhythms and plonking good rhymes and together they carry the reader along with great good cheer, safely past fears and busting a few shibboleths on the way. Here we have a school for dragons and…
Light-hearted and touching at the same time, the story of the frog who becomes a Broadway hit dancing with Fred Astaire springs from the imagination of a tired mum to entertain her son. If we chose, we can realise that this tale of Great Aunt Gertrude who so nearly drowned herself when her captain husband…
Jimmy and his little brother are evacuated to Wales along with some of his school. It’s the phoney war, so he doesn’t see the point and is hurting because of what’s happened at home. To make it worse his brother takes to it all like a duck to water and his best mate betrays him….
Beautifully done, this is a tale of moving to a new place and finding your feet and making friends. Artist Richard Jones has a great delicacy with colour and an expressive use of form and space. He has done a great job (and so have the Chinese printers) of making the lion almost, but not…
